


An Irregular Doctor

by tartanfics



Series: Identification [6]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, M/M, Porn Watching, Robot Feels, Robot Sex, Robot Sherlock, Robots, Sex Bots, Three Laws of Robotics, baker street irregulars - Freeform, discussion of robot suicide, having a robot for a flatmate sometimes gets awkward, not actually an Asimov crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-29
Updated: 2014-08-29
Packaged: 2018-02-15 07:20:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2220450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tartanfics/pseuds/tartanfics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>London, 2081. 221B has become a revolving door of robots, each one more falling to pieces than the last. Sherlock’s irregulars come to John now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Irregular Doctor

**Author's Note:**

> This is #5 in the series-of-fics that forms the sequel to [This Machine Called Man](http://archiveofourown.org/works/524552/chapters/928252). You may want to read the fics previous to this first, but you can probably skip This Machine Called Man if you want to. New fics in the series should go up weekly on Friday or Saturday; to get notifications of the updates you should [subscribe to the series](http://archiveofourown.org/series/26877), and not to the individual fics.
> 
> Sorry about the delay with updates! I was sick and then traveling.

For months at a time, John never touches Sherlock. He's a high-functioning autonomous android, he doesn't need regular maintenance. 

John forgets himself. He laughs at something Sherlock says, or nags Sherlock to tidy the kitchen. Sherlock: John's flatmate, his colleague, his friend--something like a friend. 

John prefers not to think too hard about what he's doing here. He's having too much fun to want to question it. He hadn't realised how little fun he's had in years. Afghanistan gave him purpose and action, but little fun, and less balm to disappointment. 

They solve crime. John blogs about it. 

John keeps having dreams about eating with Sherlock, watching him sleep, cleaning a head wound that's a mess of grit and congealing blood. He gets used to it. It's normal, natural for humans to apply human traits to their robots. Not ideal, maybe, but hardly unexpected. 

Sometimes John forgets to question it when Sherlock does something... human. Emotional. He forgets to pick apart the subroutines from the improbable, forgets what's likely to be programmed for appearances and what's not. 

John always knows Sherlock is a robot. But sometimes it's easy, so easy, to forget what that's supposed to mean. 

-

Just because Sherlock doesn't need regular maintenance doesn't mean John never does robotics work. 221B has become a revolving door of robots, each one more falling to pieces than the last. Sherlock’s irregulars come to John now. He doesn’t know if Sherlock planned this, but it started when Sherlock dragged John into a derelict building and made him extract the virus that was infecting one of the droids. And now the word is out, and John is so ensconced in the irregulars’ world he doesn’t think he could extract himself even if he wanted to.

Sometime in November, the first homeless robot John ever met comes to them. John still remembers her vividly, her hooded silhouette in the dim light of a Tube tunnel and the jagged tear of skin around her wrist. John remembers his own lurching introduction to the world of the irregulars--his shock, his disjointed fear, and his questions. But it's familiar now. 

"There's a droid out the back," Sherlock says, coming through the hallway from his bedroom with a pair of goggles hanging off his fingers and his dressing gown flapping. 

"For you or for me?" John asks, shaking out the rag he's using to scrub something mysterious and sticky off the worktop by the sink. He means--injury or information, the robots' technician or the detective. 

"For you," Sherlock says. He drops the goggles onto the pile of detritus on the table. He scrubs his hands through his hair and glares at John. "They're always here for you. I need a case!"

John smirks at Sherlock's back as he stalks into the living room, and goes downstairs to answer the door. 

The droids all come in the back, past 221’s bins and the ones from Speedy's. Some of them have coms modified to work without fingerprints or the ability to contact Sherlock using their own systems. Some of then knock. Their ability to move through the city unnoticed is impressive and a little alarming. Robots in public spaces are controversial, and regulations permit their presence only in the company of owners or technicians, or while fulfilling their assigned function. But the irregulars have no owners or maintenance techs, and in many cases their primary functions have become meaningless, defunct, obsolete and expired. Some pass for human if nobody pays attention. Most don't, and John suspects they only remain free because of their ability to move through the Underground tunnels. 

John unlocks the door and pulls it open. He recognises the droid immediately, her pale skin and large blue eyes, the way the sleeve of her tattered hoodie is pulled down over her left hand. She meets his eyes and he can see her system ticking as she analyses his face. 

"You are the doctor?"

John blinks, momentarily off balance. He knows the robots call him a doctor, but after the long-made decision to go into robotics rather than medicine, it’s still strange. And it isn’t common to call roboticists doctors of any kind. “Yes.” He steps back from the door and gestures the droid inside. She moves slowly, pausing to assess his gesture for its meaning.

"You replaced JN-148's knee joint," the droid says after John has closed and locked the door behind her. Her words are at odds with her manner. She's making eye contact, half-smiling in a flirtatious way. She was a sex bot, John remembers, and it's obvious the subroutines associated with that function are still running. Only in her face, though. Her body language is stiff and out of sync with her expression.

John skirts around the droid and moves down the hallway toward the stairs. Even the minimal lingering evidence of a sex bot's programming is making him uncomfortable, despite the fact that she's obviously not here for sex.

Without looking back for confirmation that she's following him, John says, "I did. Come upstairs."

Sherlock is sprawled on the sofa, dressing gown tucked around him. He raises his eyebrows at John and then looks past him to the robot. He makes a little _hmph_ noise when he sees her, his expression clearing. "Mirin," he says in greeting. John turns in time to see her give a little wave with the hand that's not hidden in her sleeve.

"I assume you're here about your hand," John says, remembering the torn skin--though as soon as he says it he wonders about the subroutines governing her flirtatious mannerisms. Would she want those removed too? But then he'd have to replace them with something, or she'd seem lifeless, immobile.

Robots are what they are, and the more familiar John becomes with the irregulars, the more he sees that they want to keep what little they have.

Mirin shakes back the dirty, fraying cuff of her sweatshirt. Her movements are slightly jerky as she pushes the sleeve up her arm. It's no secret that robot kinematics is advanced enough to create better robots than this--Sherlock may be illegal, but all the design and materials of his body are documented on a theoretical level. This droid is more impressive aesthetically-speaking than in her design. She's made to be looked at, not to move well. 

"I am not able to keep it clean," she says, looking at her own hand. There's something strange about it, this robot looking at the blatant evidence of her own roboticness. 

In the better light of the flat, John can see that the skin--very like Sherlock's in behaviour, but not quite as convincing--has been cut at the wrist. With a knife, maybe, serrated or blunt. Not with a sterile scalpel, the way John cuts Sherlock's skin open if he needs to access any internal mechanisms. Though all the skin above the wrist is intact, the skin of the hand has been ripped away. It wouldn't have come off that easily. It wouldn't have peeled off in one piece like a glove, because the hands are one of the most delicate and mobile parts of a robot's body. The skin would have been tethered at several points, tied to the polymer muscles and tendons that are now open to the air. The lightweight steel bones are faintly tarnished. It's ugly and disturbing, even for a roboticist like John who has no shortage of experience.

He wonders how it happened, who cut it away. What would it have felt like? Would a sex bot have had any kind of pain response installed when she was built?

"Sit down," John says. He pulls a chair out from the table and waits while Mirin crosses the room and sits in it. She extends her arm, bent at the elbow and parallel with her shoulder, presenting her arm for John's inspection. 

John swallows his sudden regret that he told her to sit and takes hold of her fore-arm. He rotates it, looking at the hand and wrist from all angles, the points--some obvious, some not--where the skin would have been attached.

"Can we get hold of some replacement skin?" John asks Sherlock, turning away from Mirin without letting go of her arm. 

Sherlock isn't watching John work. His eyes are fixed on the ceiling. "Probably. I've ordered unmoulded skin before with no difficulty."

John thinks of Sherlock's alternate faces. Sherlock handles their supply chain, both for his own needs and for John's work with the irregulars. It's safer if John isn't found buying robotics materials, with his expired license and the British Robotics Council's occasional inquiries into his status. Safer still if he has no idea where Sherlock buys any of it.

"Good." John lets go of Mirin's arm and rummages around in the desk drawer for a measuring tape. He measures the hand, taking notes on his com, and then lets her go with a sense of relief that's too strong for comfort. John should be able to maintain robots of any description, sex bot or medic droid. He shouldn't discriminate. She's not even actively performing her function, this should be fine.

"Come back in a week," John says as he ushers her out the door. "I'll be able to replace the skin. We'll wait to clean the hand until then; it would just get dirty again if I did it now." He smiles and is startled when she responds in kind. Of course they'd give a sex bot a nice smile.

"Thank you, Dr. Watson," she says. Barely four sentences from her. John has no sense of why she's here. There's no hope or expectation about a newly functional hand. It's startling that John has come to expect more than this. Not just because of Sherlock, but from the irregulars.

There's more to robots than John ever knew, and he's been a roboticist for nearly twenty years.

When John gets back upstairs Sherlock is frowning at him. 

"What?" John asks, more sharply than he intends. 

"She makes you uncomfortable. Because she's a sex droid."

John heaves a sigh. He's about to be deduced, and he knows it.

"You have a history with sex droids, some formative experience that you found distasteful, compounded by the general stereotypes that all roboticists enter the field with the intention of building or using robots for sex. You're ashamed of your inability to treat sex droids as comfortably as you treat other droids, but not enough to change it. You feel your discomfort with sex droids protects you from any accusations of fulfilling the stereotype." Sherlock says this without stopping for breath and then his frown slides back into place. "Ridiculous."

"If everyone you met assumed you have sex with robots, you'd be uncomfortable around them too," John says hotly.

Sherlock raises one eyebrow, and John realises what he's just said. He blinks several times at Sherlock, unseeing. Conveniently, he remembers they're out of milk. "I should go shopping, see you later."

He can feel Sherlock watching him leave. 

-

The replacement skin arrives four days later, delivered by courier droid. Mrs. Hudson accepts the package and carries it upstairs for them. Sherlock is standing by the window, holding his violin but not playing it. John was attempting to force Sherlock into answering the bell by refusing to answer it himself, but Mrs. Hudson foiled that plan.

"Courier droid's looking a bit peaky," Mrs. Hudson says, setting the package down on their coffee table and moving around it to fluff the pillows. "You should answer your doorbell, dears, I can't be carrying your mail up and down the stairs every day with my hip."

John smiles at her over his eggs and toast and tilts his head toward Sherlock.

"He's still waiting for something good to turn up."

"No cases?" Mrs. Hudson asks. It's funny how living with Sherlock warps your sense of the desirability of murder.

John shakes his head and takes another bite of toast.

"I'm sure something will turn up soon," she says, bustling into the kitchen and stacking the scattered plates John hasn't got around to washing yet.

At that moment, Sherlock whirls into movement, setting his violin down on the table across from John and his breakfast and throwing open the window. He sticks his head out and shouts, "Don't bother ringing the bell. The door is open!"

Faintly, John hears a voice call, "What?" and then a pause, as Sherlock refuses to repeat himself and the person on their front step decides to open the door. 

Sherlock pulls himself fully back inside and slams the window shut. "Hurry up and finish your breakfast, John. We have a case!"

"How can you possibly know already?"

Sherlock only grins.

He's right, of course. The person on their front step turns out to be a woman called Millicent Tibble, with a faked painting on her hands and an auction house to placate. The case takes three days. By the time John remembers he's missed his appointment to fix Mirin's hand, he's been awake for 24 hours and away from 221B for twelve, and he's too fuzzy-brained to feel guilty.

-

> **HERO OF THE REICHENBACH.**  
>  Turner masterpiece recovered by 'amateur' ; Scotland Yard embarrassed by overlooked clues.
> 
> 14 October 2081, LONDON. _Falls of the Reichenbach_ , a Turner masterpiece worth £2.4 million that was stolen from an auction house ten days ago has been recovered by an amateur detective from North London. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street was consulted by an employee of the auction house after it was discovered that the 1804 painting had been replaced by a copy. Sherlock Holmes has gained a cult following due to the publication of his website, The Science of Deduction, and that of his partner, bachelor John Watson.
> 
> Millicent Tibble, a specialist in Romantic art for Weathersby Auctions, went to Sherlock Holmes on the recommendation of her sister, a fan of Watson’s blog. When examining the painting in preparation for its upcoming auction, she discovered that the painting had been replaced by a highly convincing copy. With Scotland Yard unable to determine when, where, or by whom the painting had been replaced, Tibble consulted Sherlock Holmes.
> 
> Though Holmes investigates crime only as a hobby, he was able to follow the trail that led him to the famous work and revealed shocking revelations about the fake's origins. Scotland Yard released a statement Tuesday confirming that the fake Reichenbach Falls had been painted by a robot. Though Scotland Yard claims no evidence exists that this artist robot has created other fakes that may be hanging unnoticed in the museums and galleries of London, gallery staff are advised to re-examine any art that may have been recently moved.
> 
> Sherlock Holmes refused to comment, but was photographed accepting a gift from auction staff in gratitude for his aid in recovering the painting. Though his amateur detective work has previously gone unnoticed, interest in Holmes has reached a peak and traffic to John Watson's blog has begun to cause technical difficulties, according to a post he made this week.
> 
> No detailed information has been released regarding the nature of the robot that painted the copy. Previous examples of art robots include work by Lillian Segel, a roboticist who launched a controversial art installation in New York in 2070 that invited visitors to create art with an anthromorph droid she created for the project. Other artistic robots have been proposed but never built. 
> 
> Sources inside Scotland Yard suggest that Sherlock Holmes has been involved in solving other cases of robotic crime, including the Company Co. case which started a media frenzy last February. Though most of the details of that case remain classified, investigation has revealed that the series of deaths previously reported as linked suicides may have been caused by a companion droid. It is unclear how Holmes contributed to the case.
> 
> Following Holmes’s recovery of the Turner painting he has been hailed as a heroic good Samaritan, though police sources call him abrasive, offensive, and other things too colourful to print here. Holmes does not have a day job to support his crime-solving hobby, which suggests that he may be independently wealthy, a theory his background supports. His income may also be supplemented by rewards such as the one he received for recovering the _Falls of the Reichenbach_. In any case, fans of Holmes’s website eagerly await his next case.

-

Sherlock filters out the sounds of traffic on Piccadilly, passing pedestrians, John's breathing. He listens to the sound of his lockpicks in the door labeled, "Keep clear. Exit from emergency escape route," until with a click the lock opens. This isn't the first time Sherlock has picked the lock of the abandoned Down Street Tube station. 

"How do you know she'll be here?" John asks. He is standing closer to Sherlock than usual, an unconscious attempt to block their breaking and entering from view.

"I don't. But she only has a few regular haunts, and this one is the most likely."

Sherlock eases the door open and steps back to let John inside. They're at the head of an emergency staircase, brightly-lit and spiraling downwards. Sherlock lets the door shut quietly behind himself and drops his lockpicks into his coat pocket. 

John was insistent that they find Mirin and apologise for missing the appointment to fix her hand. Sherlock acknowledges that keeping the irregulars functioning optimally is in his best interests, but this excursion is tedious and he has no doubt he could find other more interesting uses for that replacement skin. 

On the whole, John's role in keeping the irregulars maintained is beneficial. It keeps him busy and feeling useful, and satisfies his desire to be doing robotics work when Sherlock doesn't need him. Sherlock long ago determined that John's happiness is worth a bit of effort. It makes him much more agreeable and willing to follow Sherlock's direction. In fact there are numerous reasons to keep John happy, so many that Sherlock no longer considers each of them individually when planning his actions. At present, the fame Sherlock's involvement in the Reichenbach Falls case has garnered them is making John uncomfortable, and Sherlock has to do something to counteract that. Therefore: finding Mirin and repairing her skinned hand.

John is looking to Sherlock for a cue, so Sherlock gestures at the stairs and loads the face that means he doesn't have to voice an " _obviously_." John rolls his eyes and starts downward.

They find Mirin around the third curve of the staircase, seated on a step against the central pillar of the stairs. Her eyes are unfocused, face expressionless; she's in a form of stand-by mode. Not the full stand-by a legal robot would be in as a matter of course, but the modified stand-by most irregulars use when not active--maintaining certain awareness functions in order to forestall potential dangers.

Sherlock is rarely inactive enough to use his stand-by mode; he sometimes uses it to recharge, but most of the time he deems this a waste of time.

He does remember what it's like not to have a function, however. When Sherlock isn't assigning his irregulars information-gathering tasks, they have nothing to do. Stand-by must be a necessary tool to keep their brains from atrophying.

"Mirin," John says, crouching down on the step below hers and attempting to catch her attention enough to snap her out of stand-by. He's trying not to make too much noise on the echoing staircase, but his voice is pitched in a way that is sharp if not loud.

Sherlock leans against the far wall and watches as a somewhat less blank expression scrolls its way up her face, hitting first mouth and then eyes and eyebrows and forehead. This particular droid hasn't been able to rid herself--hasn't tried--of her sexualised mannerisms. Her expression reads as coy to Sherlock, currently unwilling to be charmed by a client but with a promise that this may change. Mirin is an intelligent robot, relative to the rest of the irregulars (not relative to Sherlock). She may not be able to express it via her limited inventory of facial expressions, but she doesn't trust John after he failed to repair her at the appointed time.

"I missed our appointment," John says softly. "I'm sorry. I can repair your hand now, if you want to come back to Baker Street."

"I went there. You were not there."

"No, we were on a case. I have your skin, if you still want a nice new hand."

She looks at John for too long to seem conversationally natural, the same expression still frozen on her face. John waits patiently. Sherlock crosses his arms over his chest. John's insistence on coming to find Mirin is probably also a function of his discomfort with her history as a sex droid; he's attempting to overcome the discomfort, at least in her case. As she is no longer an active sex droid, as far as Sherlock is aware, that shouldn't be so difficult. Few sex droids turned irregulars continue to fulfill any sexual functions, though there are unregulated brothels where they could find work if they chose.

"Yes. Please," Mirin finally says.

"Good," John says firmly, placing his hands on his knees to propel himself to a standing position. Mirin watches this movement, and after a moment copies it. John takes a couple of steps upward and looks back for her to follow him, but she doesn't move. Sherlock frowns. She's slower than she should be, even given the lazy kinematic designs she was built with.

Suddenly Mirin's face goes blank again, blanker even than before. Her limbs stiffen, joints locking into place. All lifelike appearances disappear; her basic, static machine nature becomes primary. 

John glances back again. "What--?"

John is interrupted by the sudden collapse of Mirin's balance system. She pitches forward, torso leading as she falls. Sherlock stands motionless, compelled by the need to let whatever is happening happen, to see how this will play out before he acts. There is no Law that demands he prevent another robot from coming to any harm. She will fall down the stairs, and Sherlock will let her. She can't become much more damaged than she already is. The spiraling of the stairs will prevent her from falling too far. 

Sherlock's attention is drawn away from Mirin's fall by John's sudden motion. He skids down the stairs, grabbing at the back of Mirin's hoodie. Her knees have collapsed, and in another moment her upper body will propel her forward and downwards. She never falls. John hauls her back, stumbling up a step as he takes her weight. "Sherlock," he says, breathless. "Help me."

They manage to lever Mirin onto her back, laying her on the stairs. She's bluescreened, unconscious and still, all the systems that give her the appearance of sentience shut down.

"What happened?" John asks. He's crouched on the stairs, hand on the side of Mirin's head as he thumbs at her stiff open eyelids. 

"You're the roboticist," Sherlock says. He doesn't know what's happened. Robots do malfunction like this, for no apparent reason. But usually not all at once--speech functions might shut down, or kinetic function, or balance. But all of Mirin's functions are gone at once, a total bluescreen. She is effectively dead.

"She just shut down," John mutters. "She wasn't online, was she? There's no way she could have caught a virus?"

"No, Mirin had no networking capabilities."

"She could still have had a virus. Transmitted manually, and then sitting dormant in her system. Something would have had to activate it."

"Or she shut herself down." Sherlock suggests this because it is the only other possibility that would account for the nature of her bluescreen. The danger of such a suggestion is irrelevant.

"That's impossible," John says, voice low and tense. He knows it's not impossible. The Third Law of Robotics prevents robots from harming themselves, but this wouldn't be the first time the possibility of breaking the Three Laws has been demonstrated to them. It is possible that Mirin shut down willingly. Improbable, especially given current circumstances--she expected John to fix her hand, and it is unlikely that she would choose this moment to cause her own death.

Sherlock chooses not to refute John's statement. "Can you reboot her?" he asks.

John stops examining her eyes and puts his hand on the back of her neck to tip her forwards. Most true-humanoid droids of Mirin's generation have an access point at the small of their backs. John rests her upper half on her knees and shoves her hoodie up. There's a small port open in her spine. John fumbles his com and a connection cable out of his coat pocket and connects his com to the droid.

It takes ten minutes, John poking at the screen of his com and frowning, Sherlock standing over them. He eventually kneels and rifles through Mirin's pockets, but there's nothing significant in them. A power cell, probably the last one Sherlock gave her in payment that she hadn't yet needed to use. 

"No," John says finally, unplugging his com and folding it. "She's gone. It really does look like she just shut down. I can't find any traces of a virus. There are probably viruses that would look like that--shut everything down and then disappear. But there's no way to tell."

Sherlock stands. He pockets the unused power cell and watches John put his com away and--unnecessarily, absurdly--ease Mirin's upper body back and close her eyes.

"What do we do?" John asks. 

"Leave her here. I'll send someone round to collect her."

John stands. His knees crack and he winces. "If she did shut herself down..." he says. "Why?"

"Irregulars don't always operate with maximum functionality. Her capacity to reason may have been damaged to the point where a forced bluescreen seemed like the logical option. It is not out of the question that death may have been an act of self-preservation, in view of her prospects. Especially if the Third Law was weakened."

"You're suggesting she killed herself because she didn't see the point of continuing to function," John says. His voice is flat and emotionless, and at one time Sherlock would have taken this at face value. Now he compares it to the history of John's manner of talking about subjects which disturb him and determines that John may be so disturbed that he is unable to express it vocally.

"She was useful to me and aware of that fact, but it's not a totally illogical conclusion for her to make. Assuming, of course, that this can't simply be attributed to a virus."

John stares down at Mirin's motionless body. He shows barely any signs that he's listening to Sherlock, but after a moment he jerks his head up and without looking at Sherlock begins to climb the stairs.

"We can't do anything about it, can we," he says over the sound of his footsteps.

"Not with the information available to us, no." Sherlock follows him up the stairs, leaving Mirin behind. He certainly doesn't need a last look to reassure himself that she's really dead. 

John takes one of his long, supposedly calming breaths, and lets it out again. "So I should let it go. Robots malfunction every day. I'll just ignore the fact that this kind of malfunction doesn't make any sense, or the bloody timing--" He reaches the top of the stairs and breaks off, turning around to look at Sherlock. They're at eye level, Sherlock on the step below. "Every time robots go wrong around us it's Moriarty's fault. Is he back?"

"There's been no sign of him for months." Sherlock examines John's face in all of its lined, minute detail. Sherlock knows it flawlessly, could create a photo-realistic drawing of John from memory. But he doesn't know all of John's possible facial expressions, and can't parse the mix of anticipation and adrenaline and worry John currently has on his face.

"He can't have missed the fact that you've just become a minor celebrity."

"No, that's unlikely."

"So what's he doing?"

Sherlock reaches around John and opens the door to the street. Their heads are close together when Sherlock says, "I don't know," and John's pupils expand. John's breath catches in his throat, and Sherlock files away this reaction. Hardly unprecedented, this evidence of John's physical attraction to Sherlock under certain conditions. But it's always worth gathering more data on the subject.

John backs out onto the street and turns away. This has just as much precedent: evidence of John's willful ignorance of his attraction. It's not as if Sherlock wants John to act on his attraction, but if he decides it's a problem it may prompt him to leave, and that possibility cannot be allowed to occur. Sherlock lets him walk away, leaving ample distance between them.

"Take some low profile cases for a while," John says when they reach Piccadilly. "Don't attract any more attention than you have to." He stops just out of the path of the busy street's foot traffic, and turns back to Sherlock. "Be careful. Please."

It's not a request Sherlock would ever have accepted from Mycroft. From Mycroft it would have been evidence of his tendency to repress Sherlock's efficiency. But from John it's something else, and Sherlock hasn't yet identified the precise nature of John's concern for his safety. He simply nods. "Yes."

-

John is more or less successful at letting go of his fears about Mirin's death. Yes, it was weird, but robots are machines and machines malfunction every day. Sometimes it's hard to explain. It doesn't have to mean a roboticist criminal mastermind is involved.

John's always been good at denial.

Sherlock is draped over the sofa in his pyjamas, doing nothing. It's eight o'clock in the evening. John has been watching terrible telly for three hours, straight through ordering Chinese and eating Chinese and drinking a beer. Everyday life in 221B has reached a comfortable plateau after all this time. Sherlock is probably the best flatmate John has ever had, biohazard kitchen aside, and John has reached a compromise with himself about it. He still has dreams that Sherlock is human, but he's accepted that as inevitable and stopped worrying about it. He just has to take Sherlock as he is, whether or not his subconscious wants to influence his image of Sherlock.

It's never fun to be around Sherlock when he has nothing to do, but John's glad he's currently in lying-on-the-sofa mode, because it means he hasn't done anything else to attract the media's attention. No cases have come their way all week, apart from a few inquiries via John's blog that Sherlock solved without moving. 

"Don't," Sherlock says, voice apparently coming from the depths of the sofa. John stops his movements to get up and plants his arse back in his chair. He was about to go and get another beer.

"Don't what?"

"Spend your evening getting drunk." Sherlock turns his head and fixes John with an assessing stare. John is used to being deduced and likes it more than he'd care to admit, coming from Sherlock. (It makes him squirm when Mycroft deduces things about him.) He can't tell where Sherlock's going with this one, though.

"Why the hell not?" He gets up again, now that he's sure Sherlock isn't telling him not to get up because if he does it'll put him in a sniper's sights, or something.

"You stare at me 14% more than usual when you've been drinking. It's distracting."

John stares. He considers sitting down again.

"I don't stare at you."

Sherlock raises one eyebrow. Where'd he pick up that mannerism, John wonders. Does he know it makes him look unbearably clever and knowing? "John. I'm an android. I have the data. You stare at me more than the average person stares at a colleague or a flatmate, and the frequency of staring increases when you drink more than 800 mL of your preferred beer in a comfortable environment such as our flat."

"What the hell are you keeping data on that for?"

Sherlock levers himself up to a sitting position with one long hand on the edge of the coffee table. He leans forward over it, toward John. It'd be a pretty suggestive pose if it wasn't _Sherlock_. "I keep data on everything," he says.

John swallows thickly--beer suddenly sounds better than ever. "Of course you do," he says, trying to sound dismissive. He swallows again. "Fine. Fine, I won't get drunk and watch telly tonight. I'm going upstairs."

He considers taking the beer with him, but that seems vaguely pathetic, so he doesn't.

In his room John tugs back the covers on his military-made bed and takes his jeans off. It's too early for sleep, and John feels too restless and out-of-sorts anyway. He takes his com out of his jeans and unfolds it. Might as well catch up on the robotics news articles that have been piling up in his tracked news feed. Not that that will calm him down--robotics news is frequently frustrating and enraging. John always reads between the lines to see the anti-roboticist assumptions the media makes, the underlying stereotypes and the repression of the roboticists' more interesting innovations.

If John were the self-reflective type, he'd have driven himself mad wondering how much happier he'd have been if he'd just become a doctor.

Real doctors lose patients too, of course.

All the same, John pushes his pillows up against the head of the bed and sits, and starts working his way through the old news. It's surprisingly calming until he gets to an article about the navy rolling out a new deep sea robot. No technical information about it--popular media never tells John quite what he wants to know, but he's not keeping up subscriptions to most of the robotics magazines anymore. It's mostly some navy spokesperson talking about the usefulness of robots for such work, in situations where it would be dangerous for a human. He knows that line; it's one the government uses often. It's a familiar and easy justification for the use of robots, one John himself believes in. If robots aren't doing work humans can't, then what's the point? But the rest of the article talks about the team of roboticists who designed the deep sea robot; painting an uncomfortably vivid portrait of them as robot geeks too caught up in fiddling with robot parts to be functional in society in any other way.

John stops reading, and closes the news screen.

With the com unfolded its creases are invisible, the flexible material of the device smoothed into a completely flat surface. Its folding pattern still keeps order on the screen, however. John has arranged it so that he can unfold one layer to see news and messages, another for his blog and other social media, and another for entertainment. The icons cluster in each section. John was never much for surface-level design, of robots or other things, but he admires the small, expressive images.

There's a new icon in the entertainment fold. John doesn't remember putting it there. He hasn't downloaded any new apps recently, and there's nothing that would have downloaded automatically. Sherlock must have appropriated his com while it was unlocked and started messing with it again. The little icon shows a silver hand. John doesn't recognise the symbol as belonging to a common programme, and there's no other way to tell what it is except by touching the icon and seeing what it is.

It's a video player. John has a suspicion that he's being stupid when he touches the thumbnail of the only file in the playlist, but he does it anyway. 

John is immediately confronted by a pair of breasts, almost life-size and in perfect video quality across the large screen. The heavy-breathing sound of porn issues forth, every other breath skirting into the territory of low moans.

Oh god, his com has a virus. It must do; that's the only possible explanation for sudden unexpected porn. He frantically turns down the volume, very aware of Sherlock's better-than-human hearing, but his attention is caught by the video panning down the body on the screen. He doesn't immediately close it. He's alone in his bedroom, sitting on his bed. Why should he close it? If the com has a virus, it's already fucked. Might as well see what exactly it is he's watching.

The camera zooms out slightly and pans down past breasts to stomach, which moves up and down in a familiar motion. The other participant's torso is visible in the background, broader and hairier than the body in the foreground, which has that shiny and implausibly perfect look common to porn. The camera zooms out further to show large hands gripping thighs and a large cock disappearing and reappearing inside the woman as she rocks up and down on it. She has no hair at all, but she's visibly wet, dripping into the hair of the man beneath her.

John shifts lower on the bed, tucking his feet under the edge of his sheets. He pulls his knees up to balance the com and can't help himself from justifying taking advantage of the free porn. It isn't obviously destroying his com, it's just there. Messy, enthusiastic fucking in one of John's favourite positions.

That's when the camera zooms out all the way.

The man's head is thrown back, his long neck and chin and open mouth the only thing visible. But the woman--John chokes around a shaky, aroused breath, because _fuck, no_ \--it's Mirin.

Her hair is different--shoulder length, brown and curly, whereas the only time John saw her without a hood it was very short. Her face is the same, the wide blue eyes and calculated symmetry. John recognises her instantly, in spite of the jarringly different circumstances. Her hand, braced back against the bed, is uninjured. He never had any clue to the shape of her body under hoodie and baggy jeans, but she's thin and subtly curvy, apart from large breasts. And she's fucking herself on the cock of what has to be a human man.

"Shit," John says, his erection abruptly dying. Not because of the strangely startling evidence that Mirin really did use to be a sex bot, but because all these years later his reaction to sex bots hasn't changed. They're still a foolproof turn-off.

John closes the video. It doesn't seem to have done anything else to his com, but the little icon is still sitting there waving at him. He shuts his eyes and opens them again and works his jaw back and forth. He feels sweaty in uncomfortable places, telltale evidence of how much he was enjoying that video before he realised what it was.

So. A week ago a former sex bot died, and now some unknown person has put a porn video of her on John's com.

It's not out of the question that it was Sherlock. Sherlock commented on John's discomfort with Mirin, and he knew it was because she was a sex bot. It's obvious Sherlock is aware that John's not into sex with robots, though he doesn't think Sherlock knows or understands the whole story. Putting a video of a sex bot in John's path is just the kind of dickish thing Sherlock might do, pushing John's boundaries in the worst possible way.

But it's also possible that it wasn't Sherlock, and if that's true then John has much bigger worries than his discomfort with sex bots.

If he goes downstairs and confronts Sherlock about the video, Sherlock will deduce exactly how much of it John watched before he turned it off. He'll be able to tell, from the way John walks or something, just how aroused John was. Worse, John will have to look at Sherlock, lazy and casual on the sofa and not at all the instant turn-off any other robot would be. 

John turns off the light and attempts to sleep instead.


End file.
